No Sleep till Bedtime
Sleep, alas I remember it well...I used to love sleep I could do loads of it my bed was my favouite place in the world. I had been known in the past to come home after a cak week at work and go to bed at 9pm and wake up on the Saturday at 9am and still feel like I could sleep some more.
All this changed when Baby Pumpkin arrived on the scene. Everyone tells you that you will be tired when baby arrives, but no-one explained the bone aching, sick feeling, tear inducing tirednes that happens. Looking at the clock and willing it to be a reasonable time to be up when pacing the floor at 4am. The times I've had to cling onto the cupboards in the kitchen as a wave of tired dizziness washes over me. I feel like I've had a constant hangover for the last 4 months.
Well what to do about the lack of sleep.... Pray that Baby Pumkin will one night reach the elusive "sleep through the night!" which hasn't happened yet ever.
When you have a new baby, sleep seems to become the key thing everyone wants to know, are you getting enough, is baby "good"?? And when I raise my dry eyeballs with bags of luggage underneath and admit through gritted teeth "no, the baby does not sleep". Then you get "The Look." The one that says, ah well you must be doing it wrong. Baby is manipulating you, you're a slave to them. Can a four month old have the rational thought process to manipulate me?? Is my sweet gorgeous baby girl, just yanking my chain of an evening??
I'm trying to do things right. I've read the sleep books and trawled the internet been told by everyone's nan, next door neighbour or stranger in the supermarket. And I know the theory. You make sure baby is fed, washed, warm, happy, burped and awake and then you give your bundle a hug and a kiss and put them into their cot, awake where they will settle sleep till 7am the following morning with just 10 minutes of minimal fussing time.
Funny these experts don't take into account the warm, fed, washed, burped baby who just wants to scream for hours on end. So I break all the rules, I pick up, I sing to her, I pace the floor anything to settle her and get her off to a restful slumber allowing me to slink into my wonderful bed and snooze. I know where every squeeky floorboard is from Pumpkin's cot to my bed and have worked out an elaborate path to dodge them, however no matter how convinced I am that baby Pumkin is asleep the second my head touches the pillow the screaming starts again. At the moment it's being put down to the "four month wobbles" growth spurts, teething, developmental changes disrupts any kind of sleep pattern, which is all very well if there was a sleep pattern in the first place!!
I even broke the cardinal rule of sleeping with baby Pumpkin in my bed with me so I could feed her and sleep at the same time, whenever I mentioned this to my midwife/health visitor they would tut and tell me about approved procedure and scare me by quoting scary statistics regarding the amount of babies who had been accidently killed by co-sleeping parents. So I ordered a very comfy rocking chair and now do my night feeds sat rocking away through the small hours, if nothing else it makes me feel sleepy!!
My latest attempt is playing Mozart as Pumpkin gets bathed, changed and fed to calm and relax her. Can't say I'm much of a Mozart fan myself but I do recognise a number of tracks, mainly from TV adverts, I'm such a culture vulture!! My mum has the perfect solution, put baby onto formula milk it makes babies sleep for hours. Apparently I was a formula milk fed baby and I slept 10 hours from 3 weeks. "It's specially designed for babies" says mum... So the stuff I'm giving her isn't??! I'm stubborn, I want to do the best for Pumpkin so I'm perservering and one day she might sleep through, if I relax and don't think about it.... When she's a teenager I'll be trying to force her out of her bed. If only!!!
posted by Pixie @ 8:30 PM
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